


family, duty, honor

by saphnekluger



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Canon divergence because canon sucks, F/F, Gendrya babies, Queen in the North Sansa, Queen of the Six Kingdoms Dany, Slow Burn (ish), Wholesome Family Fun, fix it by making everything gay
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-07
Updated: 2019-08-07
Packaged: 2020-08-11 11:46:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20153068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saphnekluger/pseuds/saphnekluger
Summary: those were the words of her mother's house, she would not take them lightly. but there will always be a part of her that yearns to be free.





	family, duty, honor

**Author's Note:**

> pls no roasts im sensitive

_ When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives.  _

In the end, nobody can escape winter. The changing of the seasons is as inevitable as the passage of time itself, and yet not existing dynasty had survived half as many winters as the Starks of Winterfell. 

A soft blanket of snow covers the castle and its grounds, restored to its full winter beauty, and there is a constant but light fall of snow glistening in the sun. Amidst the bustle of Unsullied and Dothraki marching towards the gates, clearly unaccustomed to the cold of the North, Jon Snow rides proudly on, a wreath of snowflakes in his dark hair. Daenerys besides him glows brighter than any snows possibly could. 

_ The pack survives.  _

Finally catching a glimpse of him after all these years of fighting, of searching, is enough to make Arya’s heart stop. Instinctively, she clutches the pommel of the sword at her side.  _ Needle.  _ He had given it to her. 

The sight of the Dragon Queen besides him, though, is what truly draws her short of breath. Arya grew up with stories of the Mad King, of his treachery, of how his vile son Rhaegar stole her lady aunt away and raped her. 

But she has also heard whispers in Braavos of a liberator, a breaker of chains, a friend to smallfolk and an enemy to slavers. A mother of dragons. 

Looking at her--as strangely, beautifully pale as the snows of Winterfell--Arya almost understands why Jon gave up his crown.  _ Stupid,  _ Sansa called him, and Arya’s mouth twitches upwards slightly in a smile at the thought. And then, as the procession continues, two more surprises, a Hound and a Bull. And then, the  _ dragons _ . Alive and breathing and swelling with power, still as enchanting as they were to her in her youth stumbling around the dungeons of the Red Keep. The swell of emotion is almost too much, so she slips away to the Godswood to think.

She is not alone there, and her heart warms when she spies her youngest brother, the one thought by everyone to be lost until Smalljon Umber heard of Bran’s arrival in Winterfell. He is the Wild Wolf, untamed and free like the wildling woman who raised him and the Skagosi who protected him. 

He greets her in the Old Tongue and she snaps back at him likewise, before he scowls and begrudgingly switches to the common tongue.

“Too many words,” he complains, and Arya ruffles his hair, just barely under her chin when he’s standing. At only one-and-ten he is already almost as tall as her, shooting up like a Riverland reed. 

“Why aren’t you with Sansa and Bran to meet Jon and the Sothron Queen?” He pulls a face and swings up onto a branch of the Old Weirwood. 

“Sansa said I had to take a  _ bath _ .” His robin’s nest of shock-red hair is littered with leaves and twigs and Arya can spy dirt staining his ears and neck. The Septa will have to wrestle him to cleanliness later. He pauses and blinks down at her, almost accusing. “Why aren’t you there?” 

She shrugs. “Too many people.” That isn’t the reason why, but Rickon doesn’t press further. For a moment they are alone with the whispers of the white winds and the chill of the upcoming Winter storm, and then the wolves begin to sing. 

Rickon howls back, grinning wildly, and drops from the tree besides his sister. For a moment, his Tully-blue eyes flicker a brilliant green, and Arya knows he is with Shaggy, and a part of her mind itches to reach to Nymeria and sing too. She closes her eyes and then she is there, in the Wolfswood, surrounded by her pack of lesser siblings. She can hear her true siblings, her littermates, howling in the distance. A warning? A welcome? One of her lesser sisters whines and she snarls, because they cannot afford fear, not now, and so she, too, lets open her jaws and calls to the Girl. 

Arya’s eyes snap back open, and she can hear another wolf howling, now, and then a symphony of others.  _ The pack survives. _ Father was always so wise. 

“The Queen is here,” Arya tells Rickon, “we must get you ready to see her.” He scowls again, then snarls, too wolfish for Arya’s liking. 

“I will not kneel,” he proclaims. Arya smiles and draws him closer to her as they begin to walk. 

“Worry not, brother. This is our home.”

* * *

_ Winterfell is yours, Your Grace. _ Despite having heard the words herself, Daenerys feels less inclined to believe them the longer she remains in the hospitality of the North. Jon is her only friend and only solace here, a ray of warmth amidst the harsh winter winds. Lady Sansa holds her in contempt for a crown she did not force Jon to abandon, Bran brings nothing but bad news, and she has scarcely caught sight of the other two Stark siblings in her time here. Rickon the Wild and then (perhaps the most interesting and evasive) Arya. Certainly, she is Jon’s favorite, as Daenerys has been able to ascertain through his constant fond remembrances of the girl, even comparing her and Daenerys, something he considered a high compliment. 

Instead, she only ever caught sight of their wolves prowling about. 

The biggest one, the golden-eyed beast, is rarely around the castle grounds, instead patrolling the lengths of the Wolfswood and sleeping in the Godswood. She has no patience for her black brother, wild and always fighting, so he trails after Jon’s direwolf, Ghost, the quiet brother. 

Standing at the terrace, she can spy them now, easily the size of small horses, lounging on a patch of warmed ground near the forge, black and white tangled together. They are creatures of magic, like her own children, so she respects them by nature, and resolves to admire them for a moment. Dragonglass weapons are being prepared for the war against the dead, the Northmen and Dothraki were training with one another, and as Bran has had no further insights of impending doom, things are beginning to look in their favor. 

“Wonderful, aren’t they?” She needn’t turn to know the owner of the voice is Arya Stark, but she does so anyways. 

“Beautiful,” Daenerys responds, truthfully, and Arya’s eyes gleam. 

“A lesson about them then, if it please Your Grace.” She paused, as though waiting for Daenerys to react. “Direwolves do not kneel, not even to dragons.” She’s challenging her, clearly, but why, Daenerys does not know. 

“It must be a Northern inclination.” Arya’s lips turn upwards and she nods. 

“I suppose so, Your Grace.”

The black mongrel’s head perks up and he stumbles over his brother to greet his golden-eyed sister, the alpha. 

“Yours, I’m guessing?”

“Nymeria belongs to no one, but yes, she is mine.” The wolves are very much like their people, Daenerys notes. Ghost, like Jon, was silent and brooding, with the calmest temperament of the wolves. Rickon, the youngest Stark, was just as wild as his own wolf, and Daenerys shuddered to think of the power hidden behind the most elusive Stark, if she was anything like Nymeria. “I suppose it is the same with your dragons?”

“Not quite. I am their mother.” She doesn’t elaborate, but Daenerys doesn’t think she needs to. “And like my dragons, I fear neither beasts, nor men.” Arya smiles at her, briefly, almost too quick to notice. 

“I would expect nothing less from a queen.”

“But not your queen.” It’s not an accusation, merely a statement. 

“No,” Arya concedes. “The Starks have been Kings and Queens of the North long before the Targaryens rose to power. The blood of the first men runs through our veins, just as the blood of Old Valeria runs through yours. Torrhen may have bent the knee, giving away something that was not his to give, but my brother gave his life to bring that title back.” Her grey eyes flashed something fierce. “I will not dishonor my brother’s legacy as King, his sacrifice, for any Southern ruler. Winterfell is ours, and so remains the North.”

Daenerys says nothing, but she thinks they have an understanding. 

“Can I meet them?” Arya is the first to break the pensive silence. 

“My children?” No one is ever eager to meet her dragons, but she supposes that Arya Stark is unlike any person she’s met. “If you aren’t afraid.”

Arya grins openly at her this time, eyes sparkling with mirth, and allows herself to be lead away. 

* * *

While Arya had the chance to admire the Targaryen Queen’s dragons from a distance, marvelling at their streamline forms gliding through the air, she had hoped to get a closer look. She is reminded of her days as a child in the Red Keep, dancing with Syrio and getting lost in the dungeons. 

She thinks of the dragon skulls, sharp and menacing and eerily large, and how they sheltered her from harm. 

Daenerys leads her to them, her two remaining children, and Arya has to call upon her training to withhold bursting with joy like a child. 

The green one is beautiful, basking in the glow of the winter sun, which makes his scales shine impossibly brighter, but it is the red-tinted one that draws her attention, quickens her breath. Dragons are the personification of power and magic, and Arya is drawn to them like a moth to a flame. 

“Beautiful.” Arya echoes Daenerys’s sentiment as she locks eyes with the Great Dragon, Balerion the Dread reborn. She is too focused staring into his black eyes to notice Daenerys’s soft smile. 

“Rhaegal, for my late brother,” Daenerys says, nodding towards the green. “And Drogon, for my late husband.” Arya has only ever heard stories of Rhaegar Targaryen’s treachery, of how he stole her Aunt Lyanna and later killed her. She knows Rhaegar Targaryen only by the anguish in her father’s voice, the steel in his grey eyes, and the mournful statue that rests in the crypts. She cannot fathom loving him enough to name a dragon after him, but he is not her family. 

She wonders what stories Daenerys heard about the Starks. 

Through all of this, her eyes remain locked with Drogon. He rears his head back, finally, but Arya does not flinch, does not waver in her resolve. 

Drogon looks to his mother, lets out a deep sigh, smoke puffing out of his nose, and lowers his head towards the Northerner before him. 

Overjoyed, Arya rests her hands, small and once delicate, but now littered with small scars and toughened by her needlework, on his snout, larger than her head, and looks at him even more closely. They stay that way for a moment, neither moving, connected by the magic running through both of their veins. 

The sight leaves Daenerys breathless and filled with questions that she will not get answers to, not for a long time yet, and for her first time since arriving in the North, she feels warm.


End file.
